The right to be forgotten – is not working that well.

Welcome to this week’s Technology Updates, a vibrant mix of hot topics and future trends.

Omission from the last week.

I apologize for not mentioning an important historic event last week. It was on July 20, 1969 when man stepped on the moon for the first time. The crew of Apollo 11 – Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were the first ones. More on that at —> http://g3t.ca/b7lrY5

The future is here.

The unintended consequences of being forgotten are coming quickly to light. As you might recall from the May issue, the EU court ruled that Google has to change the search result if an ordinary person asks them to do so. Up until this day, Google has received 70,000 requests from people asking to have content about them to be removed from the search results.

The first outcome is that in many cases the request brings unwanted attention to the person who is asking for the information to be removed. In many instances, the information in question resides on newspapers’ websites. News organizations are now publishing articles about which pages should be forgotten by the search engines. In addition, there is a website, which lists the pages which were delisted from the search engine – http://hiddenfromgoogle.com.

On top of that, the ruling only affects the searches going through the European version of Google. It is as simple as going to google.com to see unfiltered results. All in all, this exercise was useless. The court case should have never gone through and the ruling was doomed, as there is no practical solution to achieve the outcome.

Trending this week…

This week brought some interesting, note-worthy articles and news:

A Korean baseball team is using robots to cheer for them. Fans will be able to control them remotely. Perhaps the club should invest in better players first.

Qualcomm is in hot water in China. It is trying to collect licensing fees from manufactures and at the same time is being investigated for abusing its monopoly position. Double whammy.

Netflix announced profits of $71 millions for the second quarter. Their strategy for creating original content is paying off. They now have 50 million subscribers.